Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To me, 'Glee' is totally fantastic.
To be honest, it's more fun being the underdog.
I'm drawn to writers with skill sets I don't have.
I think the best directors aren't afraid to ask questions.
The older I get, the more appreciative I am of where I came from.
I think it's scary to be alive, but also exhilarating and joyful.
If you fail on your own terms, that's a pretty good way to go down.
I lived in a basement duplex on 96th Street on the Upper West Side.
I definitely prefer to write under my own volition and see what happens.
Sometimes you realize you don't give people in your hometown enough credit.
I don't go into rehearsal for a production unless I've figured everything out.
All of my plays are deeply autobiographical. But it's not straight autobiography.
Good actors can tell you more about your play than 1,000 hours alone at your desk.
'The Cherry Orchard' is a masterpiece, and there can never be too many adaptations.
In writing 'The Humans,' I obsessed over the financial district and the architecture.
I think being gay has resulted in gay characters standing front and center in all of my work.
That the best piece of art a person is capable of making is the one that only they could create.
Without a conscious effort, all of my plays have all featured gay characters. I'm proud of that.
I don't know how to produce work if it's not something that's deeply scaring me or troubling me.
When you're the artsy, weirdo, introverted outsider growing up, you don't fit into your community.
Writing plays for me is often an act of looking at basement-level fears in terms of where they come from.
I like going absurd pretty quickly. You don't waste any time when you're doing theater of the ridiculous.
Writing a play to get to Broadway and have a national tour is a sure way to write a terrible, terrible play.
'Columbinus' was four years of my life, collaborating with a lot of people and gathering lots of information.
Coming home for me isn't, like, one family dinner. It's about am I gonna see 50 relatives, or am I gonna see 85?
I don't think I could write a good play if I was setting out to write about the death of the American middle class.
The best thing about being nominated in a category like best new play is realizing there were enough new plays to make a category.
I'm still learning so much with every play I write. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts. I think you have to be ruthless.
Priests are very interested in theater in New York! It's this lovely reminder that priests are just people, too, who need to be entertained.
If there's ever a moment when I am an Anglophile, it's when I see so many theatres in this country that have what I would call federal funding.
The human condition is endlessly fascinating to me, and the existential horrors of life are what drive our imaginations and theater in general.
Janet Carroll and Robert Pine, Chris Pine's dad, were in my first play, and they were so astonishingly good, I felt it raised my game instantly.
Chekhov would have been an excellent screenwriter. He is singularly good at dipping in and out of a group of people's lives, like Robert Altman did.
In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts.
I'm always very self-conscious and assume the way faith or religion might come up in my plays will seem very harsh to people of faith, or who are currently practicing.
In reality, life was arranged and human relations were complicated so utterly beyond all understanding that when one thought about it one felt uncanny and one's heart sank.
The best work that I am able to do is when I am willing to write about questions I haven't quite figured out, or things I'm really wrestling with, things that keep me up at night.
Under Todd Haimes' leadership, Roundabout created a black-box theater whose sole mission was to house premieres by writers who are just starting out and have zero name recognition.
To be totally honest, I thought I would have a Broadway debut in the distant, distant future, maybe in my 60s or 70s when somebody revived one of my off-Broadway plays with a star.
Until I have a family or a mortgage, I'm trying to keep my lifestyle simple and my apartment affordable so that I can continue to focus on theater. That's as good as it gets for me.
I had spent four months in Cedar City, Utah, right after graduation as an intern at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. It's a town that has many people living the polygamous lifestyle.
I know how much respect I have for people of all different faiths, but especially for my family, who are the most important people in my life, and who are still practicing, and deeply religious.
So much of great American drama has been about a certain kind of dysfunctional family, and maybe my interests are in the kind of strange dysfunction that exists even among deeply functional families.
I was the worst-dressed person in Scranton. I was a total nerd. Obviously, I got picked on, but I was also able to find my own cluster of friends, and I think when that happens, you get by just fine.
I was sending off my plays almost like an 8-year-old would send letters to Santa Claus. So it was a bit of a miracle when the Blank Theatre Company actually called and selected a terrible little play that I wrote.
My own journey as a writer has been the discovery of different theatrical voices. Chekhov was a revelation. Tennessee Williams was another one. We read 'The Glass Menagerie' in high school, and I still remember the cover.
I've always viewed 'Sons of the Prophet' as the first part of a larger trilogy - not three plays dependent on each other but three stand-alone plays connected by theme and, likely, further adventures of the Douaihy family.
I was not exposed to a lot of culture. The shows we saw in high school, like 'Phantom of the Opera' and 'Miss Saigon,' were thrilling. But my love affair with theater started with seeing a production of 'Little Shop of Horrors' that my sister was in.
To see professional actors do my work, to take it seriously - that was the thing that made me think playwriting could actually be what I do. It's not a profession that has some sort of clear career track, like, 'This is what you do to be a playwright.'
Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts.